In a too crowded age
-- I
refer, not to the multiplication of mortal lives, but to the multiplicity
of human interests
-- it
is an uneasy business to estimate tendencies or to prophesy developments.
So many agitators, publicists, and quack physicians, each with his own
platform and his own audience, din into our ears the importance of a
thousand rival or unconnected movements, so ruled by chance is the
sub-editor's preference for this or that head-line, the loyalty of the
public towards the catchwords it favoured yesterday, that a wise man might
well ask to be excused the task of pronouncing upon the chaos, or of
guessing the outcome. Last century, for instance, one thing seemed
luminously clear, that Liberalism was advancing, and was bound to advance,
in a constant ratio of progress. Does Europe, does England, ratify that
opinion now? And if there has been a reaction, is the defeat final or temporary? Which of the modern movements are genuine currents, which the
backwash of a flood? Which of our modern evils are symptoms, and which are
organic diseases? Which of our modern results are the true offspring of an
age, which are sports and freaks of history? Historians of to-morrow,
excuse our frantic guess-work in your clearer vision.

Amidst the tangle, one strand seems to define itself
--
within the last hundred years, within the last fifty years, within the
last twenty-five years, the force of religion, as a factor in English
public life, has steadily and visibly declined. I do not mean that a
careless and external diagnosis would detect the change. Within the last
few years we have seen, perhaps, a greater output of religious discussion
in public print than any age since the Reformation. But this itch for
religious discussion, which is peculiarly British, is not really an
encouraging symptom. Men do not talk about their health when their health
is strongest; a nation does not talk about its religion when its religion
is flourishing. Statistics, it is true, may be misleading, but they are
the thermometer of change. And any statistical comparison I have ever
undertaken, or seen undertaken, seems to yield the same result--namely, that the area of lives visibly affected by habits of religion
shrinks from decade to decade, and almost from year to year. To take an
instance at random
--
Trollope, in his "Vicar of Bullhampton" ( published in 1870), writes of a
London population "not a fourth of whom attend divine service." Is it not
the impression most of us would record, after a Sunday morning spent in
the metropolis, that to-day we should have to write "a tenth" instead of
"a fourth"?

I was told the other day of a more exact calculation, made in a more
particular field, but not, to my mind, less significant. A statistician
went through the records of the old boys from one of our greatest public
schools, jotting down the number of those who adopted Holy Orders as their
vocation in life. His observations began with 1860, and finished,
necessarily, in the first decade of the present century. He marked off the
period into spaces of five years, and found that in each five years the
number of those who were ordained was perceptibly smaller than in the
period immediately preceding it. In the first of the periods the ratio of
clerical vocations was sixteen per cent.; in the last, it was something
over three per cent. In short, within a space of forty-five years the
ideal of the Christian ministry had lost four-fifths of its popularity.

It will be said, only among the expensively educated classes. True, the
old sources of supply were not the only sources of supply, and it may be
all the better for a Church to have a ministry recruited from the people.
But the facts in themselves are surely suggestive. It is difficult not to
suppose that there has been some change in the atmosphere of England
-- a
change, perhaps, more easily and more acutely felt in the admirably
ventilated dormitories of our public schools than elsewhere. It would be
absurd to suppose that the falling-off in clerical vocations is the result
of mere accident; uncharitable to suppose that it corresponded to a
decrease in the value of clerical incomes, in the prestige of the clerical
state. You must consider that the old public schools hand on a tradition
of English citizenship, of which English Churchmanship is an integral
part; that the appeal of the recruiting sergeant is seldom long absent
from their chapel sermons; that clerical heroes are constantly held up to
the admiration of these youthful audiences, and clerical ambitions
extolled. If, in spite of all this, that clergy which was once the "stupor
mundi" now finds it hard to fill up the gaps in its files, can we doubt
that there has been a modification in the public attitude towards
religion?

Nor is the shortage of clergy unaccompanied by a shortage of laity. A
mere glance at the official figures issued by the various religious bodies
reveals the nakedness of our church pews. The Church of England, judging
from its baptismal register, still numbers some twenty-five millions of
nominal members; but its Easter Communions are less than a tenth of this
total. Even when we make allowance for children who are not yet of
communicant age, it is difficult to suppose that the effective membership
of the Anglican Church constitutes one-tenth of the English population.
Neither the Church of England nor any Nonconformist body registers any
increase of membership which keeps pace with the annual birth-rate; some
of them have to register a net loss, not only of ministers, but of chapels
and of Sunday scholars. What hopes can be conceived that religion
continues to be a real force in a nation which has so feeble a grasp on
Church membership as this?

I know it is said that Church membership is one thing, and religion
another. Optimists will almost be prepared to claim that it is a healthy
sign, this breaking away from the tests and shibboleths of the past; men
are more reluctant, they explain, to give in their names to this "-ism" or
that, precisely in proportion as their own religious lives are firmly
rooted and plentifully nourished. All that is excellently said; and few
will dispute that it is possible to be a Theist, and indeed a Christian in
the broader, modern sense of the word, without subscribing to a creed or
offering your prayers in a church. But can any sensible person delude
himself into the idea that a decline of organised religion does not mean,
"pro tan" to, a decline of religion altogether? For twenty people who will
tell you that they can get all the religion they want without going to the
parsons for it, is there one who ever offers a prayer, or consciously
makes an act of love to Almighty God? There is a mystical temperament
which finds itself best in isolation, but it is a rare and a delicate
growth. The ordinary man, being a social animal, is social also in his
religious instincts. If he is in earnest about the business of his own
spiritual life, he instinctively crowds up against his fellows for warmth;
worships in the same building with them, and writes down his name on a
common subscription list. He does this the more readily in a country where
he has so wide a variety of denominations amongst which he can choose,
some of them applying the least exacting of tests even to communicant
membership. If we were really growing more religious, should not at least
the gleanings of that harvest tell upon the statistics of organised
religion? In default of the gleanings, who will convince us of the
harvest?

The main causes of this decline, so far as causes need to be adduced
for the defection of human wills, are manifest enough. Undoubtedly popular
education and the spread of newspaper culture must be credited, in part,
with the result: some of us would say that the mass of the people is now
growing out of its old superstitions in the light of new knowledge; some
of us would see, rather, the effect of reiterated catchwords upon minds
trained to read but not trained to think. The industrial development of
the country has added its influence, partly by focusing men's thoughts
upon their material interests, partly by setting up, in England as
elsewhere, a reaction against old faiths and old loyalties, crudely
conceived as old-fashioned. Further, the modern facilities for pleasurable
enjoyment have killed, in great part, the relish for eternity. I do not
know that this influence has been given its proper importance hitherto.
Mass production has made luxury cheap; steam travel, motor-cars, and the
penny post have brought it to our doors; anesthetics and the other
triumphs of medicine have mitigated the penalties which attach to it. And
the same causes which have multiplied pleasure have multiplied
preoccupation. A rush age cannot be a reflective age.

So much for the pew; meanwhile, what has been happening in the pulpit?

It would not be true, think, to say that dogma is less preached to-day
than it was a hundred years ago. The rise of Wesleyanism and the
Evangelical Movement had, indeed, put an end by then to the long
indifference of the latitudinarian age. But Wesleyanism and Evangelicism
were interested only in a handful of dogmas which concerned their own
particular scheme of salvation. On the other hand, men did believe in the
Bible, not as "given of God to convey to us in many parts and in divers
manners the revelation of himself," but as inspired in an intelligible
sense. And with the rise of the Oxford Movement this belief in Scripture
was fortified by a confident appeal, unsound in its method but sincere in
its purpose, to the deposit of Christian tradition. But during the last
fifty years and more, the fundamental dogmas of the Christian religion
have been subjected, more and more, to criticism, or interpretation, and
to restatement. Would a diocesan Bishop have dared in the middle of the
nineteenth century, to express in a newspaper article his disbelief in
eternal punishment? Would the rector of a much-frequented London church
have preached, and afterwards published, a sermon in which he recommended
the remarriage of divorced persons? Would the whole Bench of Bishops have
been prepared to alter, in the Baptismal Service, the statement that every
child is conceived and born in sin? Appraise the tendency as you will;
welcome or regret its influence; but only disingenuity can deny that the
tendency is there, and is apparently constant. You do not believe what
your grandfathers believed, and have no reason to hope that your grandsons
will believe what you do.

In the early days of the Tractarian Movement it looked, for a time, as
if this decline of dogma might be arrested by force; as if the invading
germ of modernism might be expelled from within. Even seventy years back,
or little more, in the days of Pusey, Burgon, Mansell, Denison, and Liddon,
there was a vigorous outcry whenever countenance was shown to the first
whispers of infidelity. Not so long ago, a collection of essays appeared,
written by representative High Churchmen, so unguarded in certain points,
particularly in its attitude towards Scripture, that any one of the five
champions I have just mentioned would certainly have clamoured for its
condemnation. It seems as if the modern High Church party were content to
insist on the adoption of ceremonies and devotions such as are found in
Catholic countries, and no longer concerned themselves with safeguarding,
if they can still be safeguarded, the doctrines of Catholic antiquity. Nor
do they merely tolerate in others the expression of views which their
fathers would have branded as unorthodox; they themselves, more and more,
are becoming infected by the contagion of their surroundings, and lose the
substance of theology while they embrace its shadow. And still, by a
pathetic error, they cherish the dream of reunion, when it must be clear
to any prudent mind that the gulf between Rome and Canterbury never stood
so wide as it stands to-day.

The ministers of the Free Churches will hardly, I suppose, be concerned
to deny that in this matter they are abreast, if not ahead, of their
Anglican rivals. Less retarded by the trammels of antiquity, less
apprehensive of schism, more accustomed to recognise in religious
innovation the influence of the Holy Spirit, they are free to catch the
wind of the moment and sink their nets where the fishing seems best. The
very titles of their discourses, as you see them pasted up Sunday after
Sunday on the chapel notice-boards
--
high-flown, literary titles, such as tickle the ear of the passers-by
--
contrast strangely with the old, stern message of Baxter and Wesley
--
sin, hell, love, grace, faith, and conversion. I have myself seen such a
chapel bill which promised first a comfortable seat, then good music, then
a hearty welcome, and last of all, as if it were an afterthought, a
"Gospel message." It is hardly to be expected that those who approached
their prospective audience in so accommodating a spirit should expound
much of dogma in their pulpits
--
dogma, so much vilified in the newspapers, so little palatable to the man
in the street.

It appears, then, that the two processes are going on side by side, the
decline of Church membership and the decline of dogma; the evacuation of
the pew and the jettisoning of cargo from the pulpit. I have been at pains
to adduce instances of the fact, though indeed it was hardly necessary,
for the two tendencies are pretty generally admitted; the one openly
deplored, the other openly defended. Are the two processes interrelated?
And, if so, does the decline of Church membership cause the decline of
dogma, or result from it, or is it a parallel symptom? Reflection shows, I
think, that there is truth in all three suggestions.

To some extent, the decline of Church membership causes the decline of
dogma. Obviously, the grievance of the man in the street against organised
religion is partly an intellectual one. Other influences may prevail to
keep him away from Church; as, a general unreasoning dislike towards all
forms of authority, or absorption in pleasures and in worldly
distractions. But the reason he alleges, at any rate, for his
nonattendance is commonly his inability to believe "the stuff the parsons
preach." What wonder if this attitude makes the preacher reconsider his
message? He would blame himself if he allowed souls to lose contact with
religion through undue insistence on any doctrine that was not true
-- or
even not certainly true
-- or
even not theologically important. Hence comes the impetus to take stock
afresh of his own theological position; is he really convinced of the
truth, the certainty, the importance of such and such a doctrine? He is
bound, indeed, to declare the whole counsel of God. But what is the whole
counsel of God? If he could accept the inerrancy of Scripture, like his
fathers before him, he would have at least a chart to guide him. But he
has no ground for believing in the inerrancy of Scripture, unless it be
guaranteed to him by the Church. What Church? His Church? If the Church of
England be meant, or "a fortiori" any of the Nonconformist bodies, he can
find no help in such a refuge; for a religious connection which claims no
infallibility for itself can hardly be justified in investing the Bible
with inerrancy! If, on the contrary, he appeals to the Catholic Church, he
knows that he is appealing to a tribunal by whose judgments he himself
does not abide. Somehow, then, he has to construct his own theology for
himself, and to take responsibility for the construction; in doing so,
would he be human if he were not influenced a little by the unbelief of
those about him, by those unfilled pews which reproach him, Sunday by
Sunday, with preaching a message unacceptable to the spirit of the age?

I do not mean to suggest that the desire to meet infidelity half-way is
the sole or even the main cause responsible for the loose theology of our
time. No preacher would deliberately judge the credibility of his message
by the credulity of his audience. But the prevalent irreligion of the age
does exercise a continual unconscious pressure upon the pulpit; it makes
preachers hesitate to affirm doctrines whose affirmation would be
unpopular. And a doctrine which has ceased to be affirmed is doomed, like
a disused organ, to atrophy.

That modernism among the clergy and scepticism among the laity are to
some extent parallel effects of the same causes, hardly needs
demonstration. The confident assertions of the philosopher, the scientist,
the historian
--
that truth is relative, not absolute; that we can no longer believe in
Genesis; that Christianity descends straight from the heathen mystery
religions --
will differ in their effect on different minds. One man will say, quite
simply, "Then it's no good believing in Christianity any longer"; another
will prefer to consider how the abiding truth of Christianity can best be
reconciled with these apparently discouraging notions, how best restated
in the light of these recent additions to human knowledge. Sometimes it is
a matter of training and outlook; A is already looking out for, nay, is
almost prepared to welcome, an excuse for abandoning his old religious
ideas; B would sooner bid farewell to reason itself than impugn the
veracity of the Church which has nourished him. Sometimes it is a matter
of temperament; the world may be divided (amongst other convenient
dichotomies) into the people who take it or leave it and the people who
split the difference. Sometimes there is a real intellectual struggle in
one conscientious mind as to whether any accommodation can consistently be
made between the new truth and the old tradition.

It must not be supposed that we have finished with materialism.
Yesterday, it was the concept of Evolution that was in the air. To one
mind, it seemed a disproof of the very basis of religious truth; it had
knocked the bottom out of Christianity. To another mind, this same concept
of Evolution seemed a convenient solder for patching up the holes in a
leaky system; apply its doctrines to the Christian faith, and it would
begin to hold water once more. To-day the rage is for psychology; to some
minds the new psychology has already destroyed, or is beginning to
destroy, the whole notion of free will. Others, within the Christian camp,
are beginning to take up the jargon of the new empiricism and apply it to
the problems of religion, not less joyfully than their fathers did
yesterday. What is one man's poison is another man's drug.

In a sense, then, the decline of Church membership explains the decline
of dogma. In a sense, it is a parallel effect of the same causes. But
there is a sense, also, in which the decline of dogma explains the decline
of Church membership.

Such a suggestion is, of course, clean contrary to the fashionable
platitudes of our day. When "the failure of the Churches" is discussed in
public print, our well-meaning advisers always insist, with a somewhat
wearying reiteration, on the need for a more comprehensive Christianity,
which shall get away from forms and ceremonies, from dogmas and creeds,
and shall concentrate its attention upon those elementary principles of
life and devotion which all Christians have at heart. Each prophet who
thus enlightens us makes the curious assumption, apparently, that he is
the first person who has ever suggested anything of the kind. As a matter
of fact, the brazen lungs of Fleet Street have been shouting these same
directions at us for a quarter of a century past. And have "the Churches"
taken no notice? On the contrary, as I have suggested above, the pilots of
our storm-tossed denominations have lost no opportunity of lightening ship
by jettisoning every point of doctrine that seemed questionable, and
therefore unessential; hell has been abolished, and sin very nearly; the
Old Testament is never alluded to but with a torrent of disclaimers, and
miracle with an apologetic grimace. Preachers of the rival sects have
exchanged pulpits; "joint services" have been held on occasions of public
importance; even the inauguration of a new Anglican cathedral cannot take
place nowadays without a fraternisation of the Christianities. In hundreds
of churches and chapels everything has been done that could be done to
meet this modern latitudinarian demand. And the result?

The result is that as long as a man is a good preacher, a good
organiser, or an arresting personality, he can always achieve a certain
local following; and among this local following a reputation for
broad-mindedness stands him in good stead. But the ordinary man who does
not go to church is quite unaffected by the process. He thinks no better
of Christianity for its efforts to be undogmatic. It is not that he makes
any articulate reply to these overtures; he simply ignores them. Nothing,
I believe, has contributed more powerfully to the recent successes of the
"Anglo-Catholic" movement than the conviction, gradually borne in upon the
clergy, that the latitudinarian appeal, as a matter of experience, does
not attract. Dogmas may fly out at the window but congregations do not
come in at the door.

So much, as a matter of daily experience, will hardly be gainsaid. What
follows is more controversial; indeed, it is a thesis which hardly admits
of exact proof. It seems to me that (let us say) seven in ten of our
fellow-countrymen, if they give a thought to the matter at all, think the
worse, not the better, of our modem leaders for their willingness to throw
dogma overboard to the wolves of unbelief. They are scandalised, rather
than impressed, by the theological chaos which two generations of
controversy have left behind them. It is the common assumption of all
these modem prophets, whatever their school, that religious truth is
something not yet determined, something which is being gradually
established by a slow process of testing and research. They boast of their
indecisions; they parade their dissensions; it shows (they say) a healthy
spirit of fearless inquiry, this freedom from the incubus of tradition.
Such sentiments evoke, I believe, no echo of applause outside their own
immediate circles. The uneasy impression is left on the average citizen
that "the parsons do not know their own business"; that disagreements
between sect and sect are more, not less disedifying when either side
hastens to explain that the disagreement is over externals, rather than
essentials; that if Christianity is still in process of formulation after
twenty centuries, it must be an uncommonly elusive affair. The average
citizen expects any religion which makes claims upon him to be a revealed
religion; and if the doctrine of Christianity is a revealed doctrine, why
all this perennial need of discussion and restatement? Why should a divine
structure send in continual bills for alterations and repairs? Moreover,
he is a little suspicious of these modern concessions, these attempts to
meet him half-way. Is the stock (he asks in his commercial way) really a
sound investment, when those who hold it are so anxious to unload it on
any terms?

It is not only the theological speculations of the modem Christianities
which produce this sense of uneasiness. It is the whole accommodating
attitude taken up by the religions of to-day and their professors
--
accommodating, and for that reason, not reassuring. It is an infinitely
small point, but does the abandonment, total or partial, of the clerical
garb by some modem clergymen really make the laity feel more at home with
them? Does it not rather create the suspicion that they are ashamed of
being what they are? Distrust may even be aroused, sometimes, by the modem
sympathy of official Anglicanism for the movement towards democracy; to
some minds, it comes too late to be impressive. The gesture made by "the
Churches" at the time of the General Strike was, I fully believe, the
result of a sincere desire for the national well-being. But this
confidence was not everywhere felt; many preferred to think it dictated by
panic, rather than by genuine concern. Even in matters of grave and
practical moral import, representatives of the Christian bodies have,
before now, given forth an uncertain sound, and affirmed the traditional
ethics of Christianity with a minority protest. Most outside critics
sympathised, no doubt, with the minority; but it is questionable whether
they felt much respect for a religion whose spokesmen could differ so
fundamentally.

Do the Churches know their own mind, or even their own minds? That is,
in effect, the question which bewilders men to-day far more than any
strictly theological problem. I do not mean that the ordinary Englishman
is for ever worrying about the question; the sad truth is that he lacks
the necessary interest in religious matters altogether. You will only
catch occasional glimpses of his attitude; but they are, to my mind,
unmistakable. "Let the Churches make up their own mind what they believe,"
he says, "and then come and tell me." Meanwhile, there is no sign that
such an event is probable. The present effort to unify belief and practice
within the Church of England is the heir to a long line of failures. The
Anglo-Catholic party has a solidarity that is only external; it is based
on a compromise, and its unity is that of a party, not that of a creed.
This generation will die, and the next, before "the Churches" can present
the nation with a common programme.

We have no precedent by which to forecast the outcome of the present
situation. The pulse of religion has beaten low enough in England before
now, but there has never, before this last century, been a time at which
so many of our fellow-countrymen made no response to its movements. In the
worst of the latitudinarian days the embers of belief were kept alive, not
smothered, by the ashes of indifference. The Bible was never so little
believed as it is to-day; I doubt if it was ever so little read. The
optimism of the religious temperament will continually find new grounds
for confidence; will hail local successes, and welcome the suggestion of
untried remedies; but there is no sign, yet, of a rally, no distant
foot-fall of the Prodigal's return. Organised religion has shrunk, and is
still shrinking, at once in the content of its message and in the area of
its appeal.

Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888-1957) was the son
of the Anglican Bishop of Manchester and it appeared that he, being both
spiritually perceptive and intellectually gifted, would also have a successful
life as an Anglican prelate. But while in school in the early 1900s Knox
began a long struggle between his love for the Church of England and his
growing attraction to the Catholic Church. He converted to Catholicism at the age of twenty-nine, became a priest, and
wrote numerous books on spiritual and literary topics, including The Belief of Catholics, Captive Flames:
On Selected Saints and Christian Heroes, The Hidden
Stream: The Mysteries of the Christian Faith, Pastoral
and Occasional Sermons, and many more. Visit Knox's IgnatiusInsight.com author page for more information about his life
and work.

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